Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.

This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1400 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.)

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Kate Cummings (1935 - ) immigrant from Scotland, librarian who spent much
time in North America meeting pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s. First Australian
to get her Naturalization Certificate reissued with the revised gender. TSSuccesses

From there Massarella took a position in the emergency department at the
associated St Joseph’s
Healthcare in Hamilton, Ontario, and became Chief of Emergency Medicine
there in 2001. Massarella also married and had two children.

When Massarella was 42, a trans patient suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
This brought home to Massarella that he did not want to die as a man, and as Carys she
completed transition in 2009, with surgery in the US.

Carys remains an attending Emergency Physician at St. Joseph’s and is the lead
Physician for the Transgender Care Program at Quest Community Health Centre in nearby St
Catharines. She is President of the Medical Staff Association.

“The biggest obstacle for most transgender individuals is access to medical
care,” she says. “In our clinic, we no longer refer patients to psychiatrists.
Being transgender is not a pathology. Gender dysphoria is not a psychiatric
illness.”

“What I always tell people is, you’re always going to have a transgender
identity. That’s never going to change. Whether or not you transition, that’s a
personal decision. But at the end of the day, the vast, vast majority of people
do better after they transition, or they feel better after they
transition.”

“I must say, my American colleagues…every time I tell them I did this at a Catholic hospital they are like ‘no you didn’t’ and I’m like ‘yes I did.”

14 March 2016

Austin Hartin joined the US Navy in 1953. He married while serving in Florida
the next year. Later Hartin would explain that he married to escape from having
to live in the all-male environment on the navy base. A daughter, Deborah, was
born a year later. The Hartins separated in 1957.

Hartin became a patient of Leo
Wollman, and then had surgery from Dr Burou
in Casablanca, April 16 1970. She was granted a divorce later that year from the
wife not seen since 1957. A name change to Deborah Hartin was also granted. The
mother retained custody of the daughter. The case attracted press attention as
it was one of the first divorce cases where one party had transitioned.

In 1971
Debbie was featured on local cable television and in Screw magazine. Both
appearances included a clear view of her vagina. Later, in March the Queens
Liberation Front presented themselves in a class on homosexuality at New York
University, where Debbie also spoke. Later Debbie spoke about her problems with
‘her family, her neighbors and her daughter’ at a meeting that was supposed to
be the inaugural meeting of Transsexuals Anonymous held at the office of Dr
Benito Rish.

That same year she was on the New York David Susskind
Show, and later was filmed being interviewed and examined by Leo
Wollman. Again this examination included a close-up of her vagina. The segment
was eventually incorporated in the 1978-released film Born A Man... Let Me
Die A Woman. She was living with her parents at that time.

from Let Me Die a Woman

Deborah had been
able to get her name and sex changed on her baptismal certificate and
certificate of discharge from the navy. She applied to get the same changes on
her New York birth certificate. The name was changed but sex left blank. The
Bureau of Records had adopted a committee report in 1965 to omit a sex
designation from amended birth certificates for transsexuals. This had been
tested legally but unsuccessfully in Matter of
Anonymous v. Weiner, 1966. This was re-inforced by an amendment to the New
York City Health Code which was adopted unanimously in 1971 that a re-issued
birth certificate for a transsexual should not indicate the applicant’s sex.
Nevertheless Deborah sued the Director of the Bureau of Records in 1973 in that
she was not issued a revised birth certificate saying ‘female’ and that this was
arbitrary and capricious and constituted an abuse of discretion. However the
court denied her suit ruling that the Board had acted in a rational manner and
made no error with regard to their own rules. They cited the 1966 precedent.

11 March 2016

In Nikolai Krementsov's Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction, Oxford, 2013, we find on page 152.

"Available evidence indicates that at least one Moscow clinic did practice such operations. As an Evening Moscow reporter informed his readers in December 1926, professor Il’ia Golianitskii, well-known for his work on plastic surgery and tissue transplantations, had successfully performed sex-change operations on both men and women. Entitled “Underdeveloped people” and illustrated by a photograph of one of the patients, the reportage described five successful sex-change operations: four on women and one on a man."

Unfortunately, that is the only mention of professor Golianitskii in the entire book.

1926 is earlier than the pioneering operations carried out at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute in Berlin. If this is so, the early history of surgical transsexuality will be changed.

04 March 2016

Thomalla, from Silesia,
studied law and then medicine at the universities of Lausanne, Kiel, Würzburg,
Erlangen und Breslau.

A volunteer in the War, he was severely injured in 1914. He passed the state
exam in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) and
worked at the city's Nervenklinik specialising in neurology and psychiatry.

From 1918 to 1925 he was head of the medical film archive at the UFA film studio in
Potsdam. From 1924-6 he worked as a physician and as freelance writer, and was
interested in the ideas of Eugene Steinach, rejuvenation and internal glands.

In 1924 he wrote for Uhu, the Berlin women's periodical, an article “The Riddle of
the Glands: The mysterious Effects of Inner Secretion”, where he argued that 'sex
intermediates' are the result of inner secretions, rather than of degeneracy.
However he regarded this as a disease to be fixed by glandular means. The
article was accompanied by a photograph of four 'women' who lived and worked as
male, and had acquired police permits to do so.

Uhu, 1924, reprinted p104 in Sutton

From 1926 Thomalla worked for the German state as a popular educator on
hygiene. In 1929 he was head of the press office of the association of German
professional associations.

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About Zagria

I have a social science degree. I spent several years in the 70s doing Gay Lib counselling, and moved on to organizing trans groups. I was rejected by the Clarke Institute (now CAMH) in the mid 1980s, probably because I do not match either of their stereotypes, but was accepted by Russel Reid on our first meeting in late 1987, and had surgery from James Dalrymple some months later. I have mainly worked as an IT consultant. I have been with the same husband for 45 years.